When Atticus was small he would regularly be playing happily with his toys when seemingly out of nowhere he would begin screaming and crying, reacting as if he was in mind-splitting pain but with no obvious source. It would be many years before one of his teachers suggested autism. Usually people blamed everything on his prematurity and just shrugged. So during those pre-diagnosis years, all I had to go on was him.
All I knew was that if he was reacting like he was in pain, I should treat him like he was in pain. My own experience with chronic pain taught me to take him seriously and worry about explanations later. Finally, during one meltdown he found some words to help me understand. “AND THE WIND BLOW ON!!!” It was the sound of the air conditioner. I couldn’t even discern it, but every time in kicked on and clunked off it was causing him pain like fingernails on a blackboard. Once I realized the source, we could solve it. We used fans more often, we programmed the air conditioner to have a regular schedule Atti could anticipate, and we found coping skills like countdowns that helped Atti get through what couldn’t be avoided.
The things we’re reacting to or motivated by, the beliefs that influence us and the experiences that teach us about the world, they are not always obvious or visible, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t causing us tremendous pain. If we can find why we are reacting the way we are, we can make different choices.
Managing your mental health requires developing an understanding of who you are, what you need, and why you do what you do. Learning to do this efficiently requires us to develop an awareness of our own minds and bodies.
In recovery circles there’s a saying, “If you’re not working a program, a program’s working you.” This means that if you are not actively engaged in your choices, then your behavior will be motivated by old patterns. Patterns that, one way or another, will not be serving you in the present.
Most of our unconscious patterns come out of childhood, before we knew much about the world and while our undeveloped brains lacked critical thinking skills. Psychologist Jean Piaget developed a theory of cognitive development to explain how children think and learn. According to his theory, children don’t reliably develop logical thought until ages 7 to 11, and don’t reliably develop critical thinking until well into adolescence or adulthood. Which means, if don’t examine them, we could be making our choices based on whatever nonsense our 6 year old brains decided about the world.
If you experienced a childhood with a lot of adverse conditions this can be especially challenging. Kids are already self centered because that is the work of childhood – developing a self. On top of that there is a common reaction called “The Moral Defense” where a child will internalize the blame for whatever neglect or abuse they experience as a way to cope, because their safety relies on believing their caregiver is good. Many of us end up developing our sense of self at the same time as we accept the blame for whatever chaos existed in our childhoods, which can create a level of internalized self hate that is hard to separate from a sense of self.
Mindfulness calls these kid beliefs “precognitive commitments.” They are the beliefs you committed to before you were developed enough to realize they weren’t true. Without re-evaluating these beliefs in adulthood using your fully developed cognitive skills you can derail your life by reacting to a childhood that is long past.
Even if you were lucky enough to have supportive caregivers, the advice and instruction they gave you is most likely outdated in our current world. The careers we pursue now didn’t even exist 20 years ago. Opportunities for home ownership were different. Climate change brings difficulties we didn’t imagine as children. You don’t learn how to be an adult and then spend the rest of your life coasting, you discover every day how to live in the new world that arrives every morning.
These unconscious patterns often show up in how we care for ourselves. A lot of us are still pushing through sickness or injury because we don’t want anyone to be mad at us. Our kid selves registered the frustration of a maxed out adult who had to scramble for last minute child care, or internalized dismissive messages like, “You’re fine,” and continue to react to ourselves that way as adults.
When you spot those patterns in yourself, you can challenge them. I have stopped telling myself, “You’re fine,” when I’m sick or in pain or tired. When I became aware of this conditioning in me I realized that it doesn’t make me less anxious, it makes me feel defensive. Now I tell myself, “You’re safe.”
Developing awareness requires gathering new data. When you are running unexamined programming, confirmation bias will convince you that whatever you are telling yourself is true. Once I believed I was unlovable, the only things I believed were things that demonstrated I was unlovable. I remembered the cutting remarks and forgot the praise. I remembered rejection but not acceptance.
I was self selecting the data that supported the version of myself that needed to survive childhood. Stuff that proved I was small, and ignorant, and powerless, and unloved, and worthless. I was basing my current identity on outdated data. I wasn’t all those things they said I was, I was a grown woman with friends and success and love and admiration. But I still felt the weight of all those childhood words. As if their opinions about me are truer because they were earlier.
To challenge this conditioning I started a journal I called “My Compliment Journal” and I wrote down every nice thing people told me. When I started it felt foolish and unsafe to trust in kindness, but it didn’t take me long before I believed. The journal gave me a record of all the new data I had been dismissing because it conflicted with the old programming. I looked at the people whose opinions I was weighting so heavily and took an honest look at their lives with my fully developed adult brain. I saw so clearly that they were not people I’d expect to have an opinion I respected. About anything, let alone me.
In Body Loyalty we define Awareness as any practice that turns attention into the interior experience and encourages consciousness of thought, behavior, and narratives. What shape this practice takes will be different for different people at different times but all comes down to examining what we think.
This includes ALLLLL the therapy. Different techniques helped me in different ways at different times, but what helped me most of all was having a stocked toolkit. Developing skills with many different modalities meant that I have a lot of resources available to deal with my complex brain. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and a long list of somatic therapies have been vital for me to understand myself, make the changes I have needed, and learn new frameworks to navigate the world.
Of course, therapy is not accessible for everyone and sometimes not even appropriate for everyone. CBT helped me with my OCD, but could trip me up when it came to trauma. Not every modality will work for every person, but they each offer insight and practical tools.
There are a lot of reasons why someone would not be able or willing to go to therapy but they can still practice building Awareness. Mindfulness, Meditation, and Contemplation all have deep roots in religion and cultural practices. And even a less formal practice of just paying attention or self learning through pondering can improve awareness of your unconscious motivations.
A trauma history can make turning in to your thoughts complicated. I spent a lot of time avoiding my subconscious like it was a haunted basement. In order to make more informed choices I needed to find a way to stop running from the terror inside my head. Trauma therapy made it safe to turn the lights on in my haunted basement and sweep out all the spiders. EMDR and Brainspotting made it safe to spend time there, IFS helped me make peace.
Self consciousness is easy to confuse with self awareness, but to me, the difference is compassion. When you begin to look at yourself it can be very confronting. It is easy to fall into anxiety or judgment, or condemn your every mistake. Compassion allows you to look at the things you’d like to change without condemnation and to find a way to move forward productively.